If you followed the 2025 college football season or the talk surrounding the next NFL draft, then you likely know that Indiana quarterback Fernando Mendoza is all but a lock to go to the Raiders with the No. 1 overall pick in April. The 2025 Heisman Trophy winner took the nation by storm when he threw for 3,535-41-6 while leading Indiana to a 16-0 record and a national championship. Mendoza’s draft stock has never been higher, but his inability to avoid sacks and propensity for negative plays are two glaring red flags in his analytics profile that raise questions about whether he can be the franchise quarterback the Raiders need to guide them for the next decade and beyond.
A few years ago, I took a deep dive into pressure-to-sack rate (P2S%) for college QBs and how a rate that exceeds a certain threshold can spell doom for QB prospects making the leap from college to the pros. If you haven’t read the article or would like to re-familiarize yourself with the topic, you can check it out HERE. Additionally, if you would like to take a look at a sortable table for both negative play rates and pressure-to-sack rates for college QB prospects from 2015 to 2026, you can click HERE.
After an extensive look at P2S%, I began questioning whether there was a way to better measure the overall rate at which a quarterback makes a negative play relative to his peers, and began mapping out a formula to explore negative play rate (NegPL%). I first posted about negative play rate in December 2024 on BlueSky, the sports app, and have since refined the formula to better reflect what I am trying to find. As of this writing, negative play rate is the sum of all sacks, interceptions, and fumbles lost divided by the total number of plays (not snaps) a quarterback played (sacks+interceptions+fumbles lost ÷ plays).
At its core, the idea of negative play rate sounds like something any barfly would agree with. Quarterbacks who make a higher rate of negative plays hurt their team and are unlikely to last long in the NFL as a result. Taking a look at the 10 highest negative play rates in the NFL last season (min. 200 plays), you’d be hard-pressed to find too many guys you want starting 17 games for your team in 2026. Lamar Jackson‘s 11.4 percent NegPL% last season was well above the 7.0 percent NegPL% he had for his career entering the season, although that can likely be attributed to the hamstring injury he suffered in Week 4 that seemed to follow him for the remainder of the season and put him on pace to set a career-high in sacks taken.
While I haven’t seen many people talk about negative play rate before, it was brought to my attention earlier this year that an article published by ESPN in August 2025 took a short look at how Sean Payton factored in a quarterback’s ability to avoid negative plays before he ultimately settled on Bo Nix in the 2024 NFL Draft. Which checks out when you consider that among 181 QBs in my database, Nix’s 3.7 percent NegPL% for his college career ranks fifth-lowest in the dataset. During his final year at Oregon, Nix had a 1.7 percent NegPL%. Since entering the league in 2024, his 5.1 percent NegPL% ranks first among 38 QBs (min. 400 plays).
Much like the argument I made in 2024, I believe that stats like pressure-to-sack rate and negative-play rate are more useful for weeding out bad prospects than for finding guaranteed hits. While outliers do exist on both sides, it’s worth pointing out that the difficulty of the NFL can turn any college stud into a pumpkin. We’ve seen it far too many times. It’s also worth considering how unlikely it is that these players, who had high negative-play rates in college, will buck that trend when they begin playing the very difficult sport of professional football.
Evaluating quarterback prospects is incredibly difficult, and no single stat or piece of film will ever tell the whole story of a prospect. With that in mind, let’s dive in.
Negative Play Rate: History and Facts
Before we get into the likely No. 1 overall pick of the 2026 NFL Draft, let’s take a look back at negative play rates from the 2015 to 2025 draft classes to see how things have fared for some players.
The above list shows 70 quarterback prospects from 2015 to 2025 whose career negative play rate in college met or exceeded 7.5 percent. Of the 70 shown, we have what I would consider five hits in Lamar Jackson, Baker Mayfield, Drake Maye, Jayden Daniels, and Josh Allen, and a few players the jury is still out on, like Daniel Jones and Cam Ward. That comes out to a hit rate of 7.1 percent, with only nine of those quarterbacks (12.9 percent) being first-round picks.
If we look only at the players with a NegPL% at or above 8.0 percent, we are left with just three first-rounders — Josh Allen, Justin Fields, and Cam Ward, with Allen being the only hit. While Ward is just wrapping up his rookie season, his high negative-play rate in college had me concerned about his upside as a pro, and he didn’t beat the allegations in 2025. That said, it’s impossible to overstate how bad the situation in Tennessee was this past season. Still, using Allen as an example for why another player could succeed as a pro hasn’t worked out great for teams and analysts alike in recent years. Unpolished dual-threat quarterbacks like Trey Lance and Anthony Richardson — who actually excelled at avoiding negative plays in college — are two of the latest examples of QBs whose raw tools and intangibles resulted in them being taken high in the draft, but haven’t yielded the results worthy of their draft capital. Unlike Allen, Lance and Richardson were unable to buck the concerns about their accuracy and have struggled mightily at the next level.
Some common pushback when seeing names like Allen (and later, Mendoza) among a bunch of guys who went on Day 2 or Day 3 of the draft, or in some cases, not drafted at all, has been that it’s unfair to put these highly thought of players in a list with such players who were never considered first-round talents. First, that’s not entirely accurate, as you can find several analysts in recent years who touted the likes of Sam Howell, Will Levis, Malik Willis, and Shedeur Sanders as first-round talents only for them to “inexplicably” fall out of the first round and, in some cases, well outside of the first round. Secondly, I think it’s fair to ask whether the players we presume to be good are miscast as first-round talents, given that a career negative play rate of ≥ 8.0 percent is a difficult mark to achieve. Of the 181 QBs in my database, only 49 (26.9 percent) committed negative plays in college at such a high rate.
To put it nicely, it’s not easy to play that poorly.
In addition, when looking at draft capital, it’s hard to ignore that teams, whether they realize it or not, are investing more in players with low negative play rates than in those with high negative play rates. As previously mentioned, since 2015, teams have used a first-round pick on QBs with a negative play rate ≥ 7.5 percent at a 12.9 percent rate. Among 100 players with a NegPL% of 7.4% or lower for their college careers, 27 (27.0%) were taken in the first round. Among 42 players with a negative play rate at or below 6.0 percent for their college careers, 15 (35.7 percent) were taken in the first round.
Players with high negative play rates who are drafted in the first round enter their careers as outliers simply based on their draft capital, and now must overcome the challenge of needing to be an outlier to prove they were worth said pick.
The Mendoza Line
When it comes to the success Fernando Mendoza had in 2025, and the leap he made compared to his two years at Cal (2023-2024), it’s easy to see why he’s the favorite to go No. 1 overall. Even if it weren’t a weak QB class, the 6-foot-5, 225-pound signal-caller undoubtedly built a strong case to be considered as the top pick. Mendoza’s raw passing numbers improved across the board; he displayed pinpoint accuracy at times and pulled off the impossible when he led Indiana to the national championship. He has, by all accounts, earned the attention he is receiving.
Before we get into the numbers for his final season, I want to point out that for his career, Mendoza has a career NegPL% of 8.4 percent, which is tied for 14th-highest among 181 QBs along with Shedeur Sanders, Graham Mertz, Malik Cunningham, and a few other players whose names have never been mentioned on Sundays. His career P2S% of 21.1 percent is tied for the 31st-highest in the group. While most will consider the numbers he had during his final season in college, I think it’s worth considering career numbers for all prospects, as they can sometimes include early career breakouts that can be meaningful for predicting NFL success, or show a late bloomer who could regress back to his old form at the next level — a la Kenny Pickett.
This season, Mendoza’s negative play rate and pressure-to-sack rate improved marginally in both areas. He finished 2025 with a NegPL% of 6.6 percent, just below the 6.8 percent national average among QBs with at least 300 dropbacks. Mendoza’s 18.9 percent P2S% was slightly above the national average of 16.6 percent, and while still a concerning total, it represented a slight improvement compared to his career numbers. That said, it’s hard to overlook how eerily similar his numbers looked in games against Power 4 opponents, which make up 13 of the 16 games he played in.
Against Power 4 teams, Mendoza’s NegPL% jumped to 8.0 percent while his P2S% rose to 21.2%. In the college football playoffs, which did come against some of the nation’s best teams, Mendoza had an 8.4 percent NegPL% and an abysmal 29.2 percent P2S%. Still, the list of QBs who, since 2017, have had P2S% ≥ 20.0 percent and NegPL% ≥ 8.0 percent in the college football playoffs is not good. Note that this sample includes names before and after the expansion from a four-team to a 12-team playoff, and only includes QBs who had 50 or more dropbacks in the playoff tournament.
| Player | Season | P2S% | NegPL% |
| Marcel Reed | 2025 | 33.3% | 14.8% |
| John Mateer | 2025 | 46.7% | 13.3% |
| Dillon Gabriel | 2024 | 30.4% | 13.2% |
| Max Duggan | 2022 | 20.0% | 13.2% |
| Drew Allar | 2024 | 31.0% | 11.7% |
| Quinn Ewers | 2024 | 26.5% | 11.1% |
| Jake Fromm | 2017 | 25.0% | 11.1% |
| Justin Fields | 2019 | 28.6% | 10.0% |
| Fernando Mendoza | 2025 | 29.2% | 8.4% |
| Carson Beck | 2025 | 25.0% | 8.0% |
In many ways, Mendoza thrived in a near-perfect offensive environment led by a potential coaching genius in Curt Cignetti and anchored by an offensive line composed of a redshirt senior, three redshirt juniors, and one redshirt freshman. Now, he’s preparing to join a team where the offensive environment is likely far from perfect, which could amplify the struggles that come with being a rookie QB in the NFL. The addition of head coach Klint Kubiak could help with adjusting to life in the pros, but the Raiders are still entering an offseason needing to overhaul one of the worst offensive lines in football and bring in some talent to a receiver room that’s currently headlined by Tre Tucker, Dont’e Thornton, and Jack Bech. It’s not pretty.
Looking again at the players with a NegPL% ≥ 8.0 percent for their careers, it’s hard to ignore that Mendoza would become just the second outlier of a 49-player sample — aka: The Josh Allen Outlier, if he were to hit for the Raiders. While it’s possible that happens, there’s enough concern here to suggest he’s one of a handful of quarterbacks in the 2026 NFL Draft who could leave a lot to be desired at the next level.
NOTE: Stats and information courtesy of PFF.com, ProFootballReference.com, TeamRankings.com, and ESPN.com.
